First Watch: Lowland Hum, 'War Is Over'

The power of music paired with imagery never ceases to amaze me. For this video by Lowland Hum, three unrelated sets of found footage connect in powerful ways to the song "War Is Over."

Daniel Levi Goans and Lauren Plank Goans are the husband and wife who make up Lowland Hum. Lauren found the film clips and assembled them together: "The footage used in the video was taken from three different public-domain videos found in the Prelinger Archives," Lauren tells us in an email. "The black-and-white scenes are from a video depicting the aftermath of an earthquake in California. The color footage was taken from both a reel of family home videos and an informative film about two women traveling across America on a Greyhound bus."

Over the course of the Lowland Hum video, there's a dramatic shift from sadness to joy as we go from the stark black-and-white footage of the earthquake to the family films and bright colors. "I used color and the absence of it to explore the clash of goodness and darkness," Lauren writes. "It was important to me to use footage depicting occurrences of daily life, because it is in the day-to-day that we have experienced these two opposing forces."

Daniel Levi Goans adds that the song "came out of a writing weekend at the cabin of some family friends. We were in the midst of a tiring and somewhat discouraging season. The song directly addresses condemning voices and points to the overcoming power of hope."

It's easy to see that hope in the colorful swan dive, or in the parade float in the video, as Lauren and Daniel sing in beautiful harmony that "world war is over now!"

"War Is Over" is the first single from Lowland Hum's self-released debut album Native Air, due out on August 6.